Neither have the reasons for Cheney starting the torture program been made widely known.

These were to obtain false statements about fictional terrorist plots to get the public jumpy about further non-existent terror plots and to obtain fictional accounts of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda or 9/11 when Cheney knew that Saddam had nothing to do with either.

The false statements were to be used as false propaganda to sell the invasion of Iraq - as reported in the New York Times in April 2009

Cheney turned to torture for the purpose of selling the Iraq war, not preventing another 9/11

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.”

As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

- In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.

Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slam-dunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

It is well documented that torture does not lead to the collection of "actionable intelligence" and the Senate Torture Report confirmed it.

"Rapport building" interrogations as practiced by the FBI, who refused to participate in the CIA illegal torture, enables the "maximum collection of actionable intelligence".

Torture used post invasion in Iraq was intended to terrorize the Iraqi population into submission (it didn't work) and led to an escalation of Iraq's civil war.***

Torture is only ever used:

To extract false information / false confessions (either to falsely convict or to use later in false propaganda)

Or to terrorize a population into submission.

Or for Sadism

Torture is useless for anything else.

When the lies about fictional terror plots and Saddam connections to 9/11 and Al-Qaeda didn't work, Cheney resorted to lies about Saddam's "WMD's" which were a complete fiction as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tony Blair all knew.

Cheney went to war to make billions for him and his cronies - it was never about anything else. Cheney, the banks, the arms companies, big oil and Saudi Arabia all made big money out of the wars. It cost the US taxpayer $6tn or $60,000 for every household.

PressTV 2014-12-20[...] The CIA hired two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to lead the project, according to the report.

The duo designed interrogation and detention protocols that they applied to people held in the CIA’s secret “black sites.”

The CIA defended the decision to hire the psychologists. “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.”

The spy agency told the Senate that their findings had resulted in intelligence that helped keep Americans safe.

- Mitchell and Jessen had previously studied the effects of torture on American prisoners of war and were curious to know whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might actually work on humans.

To implement those theories, the psychologists oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce “debility, disorientation and dread” in inmates.[...]